Detroit City Council began building a huge community centre in a poor district of the city not long before the financial crisis. Construction was complete by 2008, but the centre remained empty, as Detroit was in recession and cutting its social programmes. In 2012 the Ford Motor Company, which felt partly responsible for having moved factories out of what had been the Motor City, donated $10m and the centre finally opened, handing out food parcels, running literacy classes and organising leisure activities for the young.

A few months later Detroit itself was declared bankrupt. To save city employee pensions, the council considered auctioning part of the collection of the Detroit Institute of Art. But the Ford, Knight and Kresge foundations, with a few wealthy private citizens, managed to put together $330m for the pension funds, and the sale was avoided.

In October 2013 the US federal government had to rely on the generosity of private citizens to fund public services. When Democrats and Republicans failed to agree to raise the federal debt ceiling, Washington, DC, had to suspend non-essential services for 16 days. A billionaire couple from Texas donated $10m to keep open 30 kindergartens operated by the Department of Health. “The money will keep thousands of children in safe and familiar surroundings,” Eleanor Barkhorn wrote in The Atlantic.

Rich philanthropists serving community enterprises is not new in the US. The concept of philanthropy emerged at end of the 19th century, when the number of millionaires was rising: there were about 100 in 1870, nearly 40,000 by 1916. To legitimise their wealth in the eyes of the public, the rich built libraries, hospitals and universities, (Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Ezra Cornell in Ithaca), or created foundations (oil billionaire John D Rockefeller, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie). Traditional charity was local, inspired by religion and focused on limited causes (temporary relief for the poor, literacy classes), but (...)